There Are No Mountains

The subject of the day appears to be education, prompted, presumably, by the college entrance fixing scandals that have been in the news. In his New York Times column today David Brooks attempts to be profound but succeeds in showing us how crabbed and solipsistic his world is. He imagines life as consisting of two mountains:

On the first mountain, personal freedom is celebrated — keeping your options open, absence of restraint. But the perfectly free life is the unattached and unremembered life. Freedom is not an ocean you want to swim in; it is a river you want to cross so that you can plant yourself on the other side.

So the person on the second mountain is making commitments. People who have made a commitment to a town, a person, an institution or a cause have cast their lot and burned the bridges behind them. They have made a promise without expecting a return. They are all in.

I don’t believe he realizes that what he is describing is not life but an artifact of our educational and social systems, in particular of that tiny group of people in the elite elementary school-prep school-Ivy clique. Graduation, originally from Harvard or Yale but not from med school or a top business school, is the pinnacle of a mountain. That’s followed by an inevitable let-down. After 12 years of highly-structured existence you’re suddenly thrust into the much less-structured real world where, guess what? Even with maximum effort promotion isn’t automatic because there just aren’t as many positions as there are people seeking them. Some recover. Most don’t.

For most people life is much more quotidien and at its center are relationships. Relationships with your parents, siblings, neighbor kids, and then school chums. Then with your spouse and, likely, children. And so on. There are no mountains, no pinnacles. There are responsibilities and relationships. Just what used to be called “ordinary life”.

A life at school followed by the pursuit of self-gratification is lonely and unsatisfying. “Ordinary life” is becoming increasingly difficult because of a web of policies including educational, economic, and social which makes it that way. However boring “ordinary life” might be, it is what we have and how we’re built. Responsibilities are intrinsic to our happiness. The number of people who can live satisfying lives outside of olrdinary life is quite small.